


The Sacrifice

by maplemood



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Sister-Sister Relationship, Unhealthy Relationships, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-11-16 00:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18083699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Laughter follows her, clattering and brazen. “What then?” Joan demands. “You think the light will protect us? Think it holds any power over Them as walks the midnight roads?”





	The Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



> I was so intrigued by your prompts--I'd also really love to know how exactly Joan became a witch, and what led to Evelyn abandoning her for the Devil. But I also love the mystery in both of these characters' backstories, so in this fic I tried to include some of that as well. I hope you enjoy it; I definitely enjoyed writing for you. :)

_There is no life higher than the grasstops_  
 _Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind_  
 _Pours by like destiny, bending_ _  
Everything in one direction._

                                                    —Sylvia Plath, “Wuthering Heights”

 _From childhood’s hour I have not been_  
 _As others were—I have not seen_  
 _As others saw—I could not bring_ _  
My passions from a common spring—_

                                                   —Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone”

***

Many years ago, and far from here—

_Such things I tell you, such long-hidden, long-forgotten things._

—there was a woman, a simple village healer, who joined hands with the Devil and walked away across the moor, leaving her daughters behind forever.

***

“I won’t,” Evelyn whispers. “I won’t!”

Across a circle hastily sketched in the dirt of the earthen floor, her sister huffs. Exasperated. “You have to protect yourself,” she says, low and rough. “We must protect each other.”

“I won’t!” Her belly shudders, heavy with a supper hardly digested. Her next whisper sounds out thinner still, hissing and venomous. “I _can’t.”_

Evelyn is eight, her sister eighteen. They are very much alone in the world, a world ravenous and full of clawing, creeping horrors that lurk beneath the softest and tamest of skins; Evelyn is alone, and she is terrified. Gorged full of terror, sick with it. But this—this she cannot do.

“Always been a weak thing,” says her sister. “Squalling little brat.”

“Liar.” Hearth light plays across the circle separating them and across the twisted, muddled symbols worked within it: symbols that writhe, worm-like, in the tangle of dirt and shadow, coiled, twitching like a nest of adders. Charms Evelyn is used to, and potions; simple spells worked in the light. But this is no mere spell, and it is neither simple nor light. Flinching, she shuffles backwards on flea-bitten feet.

“Blood for blood.”

“No—”

“That’s the way. Always the way.”

Her sister’s voice is rough, sharp as her ever-watchful eyes, as the knife-thin winds blowing off the moor, and Evelyn is shaking, unbalanced. Tottering in the shadows. “Joan,” she says desperately, “please—”

“Come to me.”

Her belly quails. “No.”

Quick as a snake, Joan is upon her, lunging over the circle, clutching at Evelyn’s arms with her raw, snag-fingered hands. Tightly, tight enough to bruise. “Come to me, I said.” Heavy, breathing in harsh, furious gasps, she is taller than Evelyn, taller by far, and the smell of her overpowers—sweat and muck, and near-spoiled milk, and blood. Always the blood.

Evelyn screeches. She kicks, thrashes.

“Little bitch.” A snarl in her ear. Slap to her head.

“No—” One of her arms is prized up, the fingers splayed out, trembling. And Joan’s mouth, her sister’s mouth is bending to them, the mouth with its thin flap of lips and its crooked teeth strong as a horse’s, and Evelyn’s fingers, she knows, will snap in one clean bite, snap and bleed thick and sticky, like sap, and she kicks again, howling, _“Please—”_ and all the rest is lost in one enormous, indrawn wail when Joan’s teeth sink into the pad of her thumb.

Skin dents, then gives way with a meaty, oozing sting; Evelyn snuffles, sobs, and stares at the hand still clasped in her sister’s, stares at the thumb slick with spittle and trickling a fine thread of blood. In the firelight, the thread shines black.

“A touch of flesh, a touch of blood, yeah?” Joan pants still. She squeezes until Evelyn’s thumb throbs furiously, the thread dribbling to a thick ribbon. She twists her to face the circle again. “Crouch down,” Joan orders, and when Evelyn struggles she’s forced to her knees in the dirt.

The horrors. They may well wear a sister’s face.

Her thumb presses to the coil of adders. To the very center; perhaps they move, in darts and slithers, little soft puffs of dust as her blood grits into them. Evelyn bites back another sob, shuddering. _I won’t scream again. I won’t._

“Your mark. Make it here.” Joan grunts with the effort of directing Evelyn’s limbs like a puppet’s. Her sister is older, larger, and stronger, but she is, Evelyn realizes, tired. Weary almost to the bone. “And here. Pattern’s simple enough. Remember it.”

She quavers, “I can’t remember them all.”

“Remember them. The patterns, the sigils, all their workings.” At last Joan’s grip loosens. Evelyn lashes away, away from the circle and the twisting shadows to the light and warmth promised by the fireside. Whimpering, she corks her dripping thumb in her mouth.

_Too much salt. Much too much._

Laughter follows her, clattering and brazen. “What then?” Joan demands. “You think the light will protect us? Think it holds any power over Them as walks the midnight roads?”

Evelyn sucks without answering. Tears well from the bottom of her belly.

“As walks among us? As would have you, and me, and all what’s left of humankind?”

All murk and midnight, the farthest side of the circle, shunning the light—she isn’t the sister Evelyn remembers, and her voice is not a sister’s voice. _Come back,_ though it’s a snivel with no hope left in it. _Mother’s gone, but I would have you. I would have you._

“No. Never believe that.” The shadow of her sister snorts. “Thee and me, girl. All the protection you have.”

Something squirming in Evelyn’s belly, something sick of the taste of her blood, mutters, “No kind.”

“What?” The shadow makes as if to rise.

She whimpers again but doesn’t move. It holds her there, Evelyn knows not what, with her back to the fire and her lips smeared red, all her fear curdling to something darker, deeper.

“Speak up.” The firelight touches Joan’s face, the jut of her nose. Severe, cruel.

“I said,” says Evelyn, as the heat pounds at her back, “you give me no kind of protection.”

There is a silence. A long one, broken only by the snap and rustle of twigs in the fire, the keening of the night winds around their thick-walled hut.

“Go,” Joan says.

Evelyn stares up at her. “What?”

“Go, then.” But her sister doesn’t move. “Go into the dark, onto the moor. If you need no protection, you have nothing to fear, hmm?”

The heat, the blood, the sobs still stuck fast in her throat. Pounding, pounding.

“But don’t call for me. Don’t cry out when you see Him. From the corner of your eye, like a shadow, darting like a little black bird—oh, He’ll come. He’ll come for you, sister, and hook his claws through those pretty eyes, and He will hold you, He will take you, He’ll never let you go.”

“I hate you,” says Evelyn. Outside, all around them, the winds moan, and she shakes.

Joan sneers. “Eh, when have you ever not?”

_When you were my sister. When you held me, when you kissed me. Once._

“He took her,” Evelyn says, and if the desolation that, for hardly a moment, flickers across Joan’s stony face mirrors hers, she is too caught up in it to notice. “He’s got her, got what He wants.”

Joan strides forward, bends. Another whiff of sweat and blood prickles Evelyn’s nose; she wrinkles it before she can stop herself.

_Once I did._

“He,” says Joan, the word a hiss in her mouth, scraped and ugly, “will never have what He wants. None of Them will. They’re all hunger, yeah? All gaping mouths. They would eat you, suck the marrow from your bones. They’d suck the marrow from the whole world if They could.”

“Then what good’s blood?” Out of her mouth, Evelyn’s thumb throbs slower, the half-dried scab velvety. “How’s _blood_ going to protect us?”

“It’s an ancient sigil. Its power runs deep.”

“Mother had power.” Evelyn hears the snuffle in her voice, the whine that hasn’t left it since that night. “It didn’t stop Him.”

Joan crouches before her, before the fire. Joan with her mismatched eyes, beady chips of amber, baleful as a hawk’s or a hare’s. They weigh heavily on Evelyn, as they always have. They hold her fast. “I’m not our mother.”

No. She’s never soothed colic or heartache with even a quarter of Mother’s gentleness, never shrugged off whispered rumors with a smile, never smiled at Evelyn, or laughed with her, or stood in the doorway with twilight gathering dusky in the air and called, soft yet carrying like the rustles of long grass on the moor, “Come home, little one! Evelyn, come home.” Never, not once since they both huddled in the doorway, speechless, ice-cold with fear (though it was a summer night unlike any other Evelyn remembers, very hot and heavy, without a breeze to stir over the land) and watched Mother open her arms to the shadows.

“Why?” Her cheeks are wet, she realizes. The sobs Evelyn thought lodged deep in her throat aren’t lodged quite so deep after all.

A glitter in her sister’s eyes, considering.

“Tell me!”

“It was done for us,” Joan says at last. “She thought that with a sacrifice—”

_Such things. Blood and bone, dust and shadow._

“—of her flesh, it might go better for us. That He would not walk the roads while you and I lived.”  

“But He walks them yet.”

“He walks them yet. I told you, Him and His kind, They’re hungry. Nothing else.”

“I want Mother.”

“You would want Him then to eat you?”

Evelyn screamed. How they both screamed, into the dark of the night, into the emptiness of the moor, after. _Mother, Mother!_ And her legs tensing, ready to spring, ready to leap beyond the boundary stones with hands clawed and grasping, until Joan’s arms fastened around her from behind, whisked her kicking feet off the ground. _Leave me like she did, would you, you’d leave me alone—_

“I want her!”

Joan straightens. She puts both hands to the small of her back with a groan, stretches it out. Her fair hair is tangled, chopped short to her shoulders. Her face sags like an old woman’s, like Mother’s never did. The weariness that Evelyn sensed earlier all but overwhelms Joan now.

“I want her,” Evelyn says, softer. She rises from the hearthstone, her face damp and her legs unsteady, her lips trembling. She looks to her sister.

Her sister looks back. “Come to me,” she says finally, and perhaps grudgingly. “You silly little bitch, come here to me.”

Evelyn is eight. She has always been small for her age, a stripling yet to grow into an oak, Mother said. She is small, and Joan is sturdy and strong like a stone tumbled to the moor and braced against the wind for centuries, an ancient thing. She gathers Evelyn to her, lifts her up in her arms, and carries her to the straw-stuffed pallet covered by ragged blankets in the corner. She goes to lay her down, but Evelyn clings to her.

“Blood won’t protect us.”

“It will hold. You’ll see.”

“Not forever.”

Joan’s laugh doesn’t much deserve the name. “We neither of us will live forever, girl. Get you down. Or are you trying to break my back?”

The pallet sags beneath Evelyn with a puff of mold and must. On her back, a stray sob jolting through her throat like a hiccup, she says, “I can’t remember them all. The patterns. I can’t.”

“You’ll learn.” Joan reaches for one of the blankets. She pulls it up to cover Evelyn’s legs, the movement brisk, practiced. No softness in it, and no sweet flourishes—but now, away from the circle, the dribbles of blood, and the wriggling sigils, Evelyn can believe that Joan is as she once was. Her sister. If only for the moment. “It’s a matter of learning, not birth. Think I began knowing what I do now?”

She doesn’t understand. Joan has always been what she is: a stone. And Evelyn has always been a strippling, weak and small, bent ever by the wind. Bent ever by a force stronger than she.

_I would have seen her again. If you hadn’t caught me, I would have opened my arms to Him, too, I would be caught, kept, devoured, I would have seen her again._

Rough fingers rest on her cheek. “The blood will hold. I know this. You know it, too.”

_I will see her again._

“Blood of my blood,” her sister says quietly, fearsomely. “You are all to me as I am all to you. All that’s left, little girl, and we will protect each other. The sacrifice won’t go to waste.”

“It can’t.” Evelyn nods, her hand stealing up to tangle with Joan’s, but she knows already that her words are baseless, without weight.  

And she is not surprised when Joan glares at her as if she senses Evelyn is lying, for her sister knows her; she knows Evelyn is a stripling and nothing more, she knows as she says, “Run now, and I would come after you. Every step across the moor, I feel it. Every twitch of your finger, I feel it. And if I thought you would run to Him I would cage you within these walls, chain you if I had to, beat you if I had to. You see? All this I would do, but I would not let you go.”  


End file.
